Output details

A Place to Call Home

Also published in French, German, Spanish and Danish. Shortlisted for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize and the UKLA Book Award. Winner of the Zena Sutherland Award.

This book was written in close collaboration with fellow illustrator, Viviane Schwarz. The two were looking at ways that narrative could be carried by dialogue and illustration, without the need for a descriptive text. The two picturebook-makers profess a shared awareness of the importance of a strong interdependence between words and pictures in this form. This collaboration was a chance to further explore that. Deacon sought to develop a visual language that could be used to accompany his ‘script’, containing key information not mentioned in the text, without prescribing the appearance of artwork in the finished book. This process is seen as extremely useful to Deacon in later projects, becoming a kind of shorthand for page composition and moving towards an essential visual grammar that underlies all narrative imagery. In this way, it was possible to influence the content of imagery in the published work whilst having no direct role in its execution.